


Double Stop

by Lionsmane



Category: The Hobbit RPF
Genre: Aftermath of a fight, Fluff and Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-07 20:47:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5470316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lionsmane/pseuds/Lionsmane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A mistaken text sent right after a bad argument.  Aidan's Irish temper flairs right up.<br/>What if Dean had just been honest?</p><p>This is a very fluffy (and just a little angsty) alternate twist to Queenmab's brilliant story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Double Stop

**Author's Note:**

  * For [queenmab_scherzo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/queenmab_scherzo/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Pas de deux](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2663567) by [queenmab_scherzo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/queenmab_scherzo/pseuds/queenmab_scherzo). 
  * Inspired by [Pas de deux](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2663567) by [queenmab_scherzo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/queenmab_scherzo/pseuds/queenmab_scherzo). 



> (Starting from here, from Pas de Deux, Chapter 2:)
> 
> Is that a joke?
> 
> Dean frowns. Rereads his original text. Doesn't see anything funny about it, or even remotely unclear. While he's processing this confusing exchange and trying to figure out an appropriate response, Adam sends another text.
> 
> No idk what I'm fucking wearing half my dress clothes are still on ur bedroom floor
> 
> Dean's first instinct is to laugh out of utter shock—but it's fleeting. With a spike of nausea and a tripled heart rate, Dean checks the name he's actually texted.
> 
> Aidan.
> 
> Of course.
> 
> He'd just glanced at his list of conversations and begun typing and sent off that stupid text before checking—and fuck Aidan and Adam for having names that look so alike. Fuck them both.

Dean breathes in and out heavily for a moment, wondering how to repair this. An old saying surfaces in his mind about honesty sometimes being the best policy. Jake Torington, one of his very best childhood friends, used to say that all the time. This thing between them has spiraled far enough. He’d really rather just tell Aidan the truth and then they can laugh about it, right? 

Before he has time to overthink it, he starts typing.

_not a joke. I misdirected the text. I thought I was texting Adam._

The few minutes that pass feel like hours. Dean has finally placed the phone down on his kitchen counter and begun to reach for his coffeepot to fill it with water when the phone buzzes. He practically leaps across the room to grab it.

_forgotten my name already, then, have you?_

If circumstances were different, Dean might take these words as an attempt to lighten the mood, a gentle jab to bring them both back from the brink. Aidan has that side to him. But after last night’s words, and lacking any other evidence before him, without being able to see Aidan’s face, hear his voice, read the level of tension in his shoulders or crinkle of humor around his eyes...Dean reads these words to be as bitter as he firmly believes the mood in which they were written.

Jake Torrington...he’d just been talking with Brett about him the other day. Where was he now?

Ah yes. Still living with his parents.

His teeth clench as firmly as his fingers on the phone as his other hand stabs at the letters to answer.

_it was an honest mistake_

This time only a few moments pass.

_and we all know yr the only one allowd to mke those_

Dean snaps. His arm arches back and he throws the phone across the room with a roar of frustration, regretting the choice almost as soon as he feels it leave his fingers, wincing as he hears distinct cracking of plexiglass as the phone smashes into the floor under his reed worktable and disappears.

He seats himself into one of the stools by the kitchen bar and sets his head into his hands. Brilliant. Simply brilliant. He’s back in fucking university playing all the old games, all over again, and having them played on him.

He doesn’t know how to do this. He never really did. You tell someone something that seems perfectly clear in your own mind, and they completely misunderstand you and claim you have not only offended them, but that you did it willfully. So you say you’re sorry, you try again, and then they say something beastly that couldn’t possibly be misconstrued, and then you have to decide whether it’s worth the battle to respond, which involves somehow measuring how hurt your own feelings are, and how much energy it’s going to take to explain exactly why their words hurt, or just sweep it underground and weigh the importance of your pride against the benefits of spending time with this person in the first place if there are any at all.

He doesn’t need this. None of it. He’ll do much better without it. Certainly. Why did he ever want a relationship in the first place?

Aidan obviously never did. Obviously.

The phone stays silent in its new broken home in the corner. This must come either from it really being broken or from Aidan being done with this line of correspondence.

At this particular moment Dean doesn’t care either way.

Resolutely he gets up and marches towards his bedroom and grabs his laundry bag. He falters just slightly at the first of Aidan’s shirts that his hand touches, the soft scent of it awakening certain images, but then Dean rallies and goes faster, picking up article after article of discarded fabric and shoving it into the mesh bag, budging the memories up together quickly so they can’t take hold of him.

He falters again over the washing machine that gapes at him as he holds the cup of thick blue liquid soap over it. It’s all concentrated in there, all of Aidan, the tipped head and crooked smile and soft black curls, the mind full of color and questions that keeps insinuating itself into him, tapping small wooden chinks into his armor, wafting up past the sickly sweet smell of Persil.

He pours it in. It feels like he’s obliterated Aidan, and he finds himself semi-hyperventilating.

This is ridiculous.

If this is it, if it’s over with Aidan, well, then...fine. He’s been through breakups before. It’s probably for the best. The practical, rational side of him tells him he can’t be with a person that he can’t count on, a person that has a history of serial, platonic one night stands, a person who sees a relationship as a threat to his lifestyle.

A person who doesn’t want to owe anyone anything, or give anyone anything lest he be indebted.

Isn’t that what Aidan had said? Yes it was.

Right. So enough of that.

He loads coins into the slots and violently shoves the metal cartridge into the machine, pulling it out and hearing the satisfying sound of water running.

It’s only then that he notices Mrs. Wellington, one of his neighbors, three machines down, staring at him through her thick round glasses, and realizes what a spectacle he has been making of himself, having a mad moment of indecision over adding soap to a washing machine in a public laundromat.

He goes up to his apartment between cycles, multitasking a reed tie with transferring Aidan’s things to the dryer. He pulls the items out, the fabric still white hot, all the essence cooked out of them. He folds each item there on the table in front of the row of dryers, and packs them firmly into one of his extra travel bags.

\---------------------------

The next few days trundle by in a series of necessary activities that Dean performs one after the other, as he always did, because these are things that need to get done.

He fishes his phone out from under his reed worktable and finds the faceplate smashed and the power button entirely missing. It doesn’t even respond at all, the screen is dead. He takes it to the company store but it’s too soon to upgrade, and the fee to replace the phone is too high for his budget with Brett coming and the holidays so imminent. So he pockets it and resolves to deal with his contacts through email for now.

He practices Handel, and skypes with his parents, letting them all know about his phone and making sure Brett won’t be left high and dry night when he arrives.

The church where he will be performing the Handel is close to Aidan’s apartment. The bag that still holds Aidan’s clean folded clothes sits in the entryway of his apartment near his front door, a constant nudge at his responsible adult side, waiting for delivery to their rightful owner. He spends more time than he realizes thinking about how exactly to return the bag to Aidan, wondering if there is a way he can do this without losing any more face than he already has, this returning of a lover’s belongings across the boundaries and the heat of this argument that separates them back into Aidan’s territory.

This returning of a close friend and colleague’s things that he’ll need this week for work, and that he’ll probably be reluctant to ask him for given the emotional circumstances.

At some point, Dean finds himself at his keyboard, his fingers beginning to type. The letter comes out of him over the course of the next two days, in between rehearsals, research, reed tying. He goes back to it and a bit more comes out, and then he leaves it and does something else, and then returns to it again, writing a bit more. In between he shops for groceries, goes to rehearsals, vacuums his carpet, balances his checkbook. He finds that he spends a lot of time lying on his couch with the TV on, staring at the ceiling.

Finally it’s time to leave for Handel. Dean dresses, packs his music satchel and shoulders it, and stops in front of his door where the bag of Aidan’s things sits like an overdue bill. He shuffles a moment, hesitating. But the plan had been in his head for days, has taken root, and will not be denied. He goes back to his computer, the music satchel falling annoyingly down to his elbow and dragging his right arm down as he brings up the letter. He reads it over for the fifth time that day, sighs, deletes a particular sentence that seems redundant to him, changes an adjective in another line. Finally he shakes his head at himself and pushes the print button, gathers the page and carefully folds it into a white business envelope, scrawls Aidan’s name onto it (There, no way to misconstrue _that_ ) and stuffs the envelope into the bag of Aidan’s clothing, zipping it conclusively closed. He shoulders both bags and heads out the door into one of the coldest days of winter so far. How fitting.

\------------------------------------------------------------

By the time he reaches Aidan’s building he can’t feel his hands or feet anymore, and his heart pounds in his chest so hard that he feels dizzy. This makes no sense to him. If his heart beats so well his circulation should be excellent and he ought to feel good and warm, right? Perhaps it’s because all his blood is busy supplying the one part of his brain that has been trying to work out what he will say to Aidan when he opens his door to find Dean standing there with all of his things obsessively washed and folded into a bag for him.

He gets a lucky break when a resident neighbor reaches the door at the same time he does and possesses enough holiday spirit to let Dean into the building with friendly well wishes.

When he knocks on Aidan’s door he worries for a moment he may have the wrong flat number, because it is not Aidan who answers but a tall young woman with dark hair and impossibly large eyes. Her hair sits on top of her head in an elegant bun and she is sheathed in a Kimono style bathrobe with embroidered birds twining up the lapels. She looks at him inquisitively, munching on a piece of celery laden with cream cheese and chives.

“Hello, you must be Liv? I’m--I mean--is Aidan at home?” Dean stammers, feeling more awkward than he’s ever felt in his life.

Liv’s eyes widen and her smile brightens her entire face. “Oh you’re Dean!!” She surges forward and reaches for his hand, shaking it warmly with both of her own, enveloping him to the wrist with long, elegant fingers.

_American, yes, Aidan had said she was american._

“I’ve been dying to meet you! No Aidan isn’t here right now, I’m so sorry. He just went out for groceries a little while ago. You’re welcome to come in and wait for him if you’d like? I don’t think he’ll be long.”

Dean shakes his head, actually relieved that he has an excuse to say no. “I can’t stay, I’m due at a performance.”

“Oh! Where are you playing? You play oboe, don’t you?”

“Yes. Just down the way at St Mary’s.” Dean unloads the travel bag and presents it to Liv with both hands. “I brought this for him. Just some things I--well--could you see that he gets them?”

Liv stares at the bag, deflating a bit. “Oh. Of course, yes. Sure.” She takes the bag and smiles at Dean but it’s a sadder smile. Her hand pats at the bag as though it were an infant. “Did you want to leave a message for him?”

He almost, _almost says there’s a letter for him in the bag,_ but then realizes how ominous that sounds, and finally just says “Could you tell him I’m sorry I missed him? And that I’ll see him at the fundraiser? That I’m--that I’ll, uh, look forward to seeing him then?”

Liv is nodding through his stumbled words, smiling with such kindness that Dean feels his cheeks burning and is glad of the excuse that they were already red from the cold. He thanks her and backs his way down the stairwell, grateful to return to the street, to his destination of St Mary’s Church where his profession awaits him, where he can lose himself in George Frideric Handel’s well ordered movements, and hope the universe doesn’t reject and despise him too much.

\----------------------------------------------  
_Aidan,_

_This bag of your things does not mean I am kicking you out of my life. I just figured you’d need them for work this week, and I thought you might be uncomfortable if you had to ask me for them. So here they are._

_I am not angry. Sad maybe. A little confused. But not angry._

_We were both angry the last time we spoke, and that didn’t go well. I’m not sure we’re ready to talk again yet, and obviously I’m disastrous at texting, so I’m reluctant to try that mode of communication anytime soon (in fact I think I’ll be paranoid about texting for a long time after Saturday’s fiasco). If you’ve tried to reach me on my phone and haven’t gotten an answer back it is because my phone broke. I, well...it’s broken and I’ll need to wait til my next pay month to get it going again. I’m not ignoring anyone. I’m just relegated to emailing for a bit. So feel free to use that if you really need to reach me._

_So I’m writing this letter. I’m reasonably certain that it won’t be possible for me to make the mistake of sending it to Adam instead of to you, since I’m planning on delivering it directly to your door._

_I’ve told myself that perhaps things really are over between you and I, and judging from your last words to me and the dark look in your eyes when you left my apartment that night I should just let it go, try to go forward on my own and just let you go your way, because it seems that I must not have been listening or paying attention properly. It seems that you really haven’t been seeing this thing between us the way I have, and I can’t expect you to spend time with me anymore if that’s true._

_I’ve been puttering around my apartment, and washing and rewashing my dishes, and mangling Handel and Dvorjak, and forcing myself outside to walk although I don’t bring my camera. And finally today after accidentally printing out 5 copies of an article comparing pedagogies of Russian vs American musical instruction and drinking two entire pots of black coffee and tying five reeds in a row that are totally unusable I am finally coming to the conclusion that I need to deal with this head on before I lose my mind._

_It’s the last thing you said that has stuck with me the most, what you said about “not being here to do you any favors.” It puzzles me that you said this, because the more time I spend without your company the more I remember all the favors you have, in fact, done for me. I’m not talking about sexual ones. I’m talking about other things, things you might think sound kind of mundane but which actually mean something to me._

_There’s a bag of hazelnut coffee beans in my cupboard. I haven’t had any of it yet, but it’s there, and I know you put it there._

_There are three bottles of Pinot Noir sitting in a group on the floor in a corner of my kitchen. I haven’t opened any of them, but I caught myself eyeing mini wine racks at the store the other day._

_I leave my sliding glass door to the porch open way more often than I ever used to do._

_There is a recycling bin next to my printer, and to the amazement of my neighbors I have been walking it out to the curb every wednesday evening for the past month. I’ve actually had real conversations with some of them as a result, and this would not have occurred before I met you. In fact I think I may be conversing more easily with people in general, which isn’t an ability I ever really had._

_I’m not any kind of expert on relationships. I’m sorry I spoke to you as though I know more about all this than you do. I shouldn’t have done that. If anyone were to ask me to describe what’s been going on between us these past weeks I don’t even know what I would say to them. You and I haven’t really spoken about it much. I remember telling you that I didn’t want us to just be “friends with benefits”, and you seemed to agree with me about that, so I assumed we both want this to be special, more than friends but less than those nauseating couples who wear matching turtleneck sweaters. (MUCH less than that.) and since then I’ve just been happy to spend my extra time with you._

_I don’t know how to describe what I’m feeling, I just know there isn’t anyone else I’d rather be around on a Saturday afternoon when it’s raining outside and my laundry is going, and we’re trying to decide between ordering Pizza or going out for Thai._

_And I don’t know where I am expecting this to go. I guess I just hoped things would continue._

_I didn’t mean to pressure you. When Brett called I was really happy he was coming to see me, but I also knew it would be trouble. It was too soon. I knew you would be uncomfortable meeting Brett this soon. Honestly I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t have any control over the timing of his visit. I finally figured it would be much worse not to ask you than to ask you._

_And I know you don’t think of me as just some guy you’re fucking. It hurt to hear words like that, but after I calmed down and really thought about it, and remembered thousands of little things, thousands of other much nicer things you’ve said and done for me in a constellation of moments these past months, I’ve gotten over it. But I was angry and frustrated then, and I overreacted, and I didn’t give you a chance to recover. And I should have. You tried to tell me, and I wouldn’t listen. I’m sorry._

_I’ll end this letter here. I’ll see you at the fundraiser. Whatever happens, I hope your Holiday is nice._

_Dean_

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you enjoyed! Happy Holidays everyone!


End file.
